1966

05/21/2010

The party was out there. The students hanging out at this set were nothing like the ones I’d grown accustom to at PSU. No uniform of pressed Chinos topped off with powder blue, yellow or pink button-down Oxford shirts. No loafers with a shiny new copper penny peeking out of the little half-pocket above each shoe’s leather fringe. They dressed a mad mix of Army surplus and Salvation Army. They wore olive green fatigues and basic blue work shirts. Or blue jeans and U.S. Marine field jackets.

The Rolling Stones were blaring. A bouquet of incense flowed in smoke streams that vanished into thick air here and there throughout the apartment. The furniture looked like it had been thrown out of some musty attic or had fallen off the back of an old beater of a salvage truck. A big yellow ceramic cookie jar, shaped like a pig with blue eyes and a red snout, squatted on the kitchen counter. A handmade sign hung around its neck: “Please feed me a buck or two to help pay for the goodies.”

Trey looked at me. I looked at him. He nodded. I smiled. My eyes said to his eyes: This is hip. Very hip.

We fed the pig. Somebody handed Trey a deformed, scrawny, crinkly cigarette. He took a long drag then passed it to me. I took a puff, smoking it as if it were a Kool Menthol. It didn’t taste like tobacco from Winston-Salem.

“It’s not easy facing up when your whole world is black,” this redhead dude with a Beatles haircut sang, reaching out for the joint. “Hey, man. You’re wasting good smoke. Hold on to your toke,” he scolded, in words that came in staccato spurts through tightened lips as he tried not to lose any of what he had inhaled.

“My man is cool,” Trey said, apologizing for me. “He was about to choke.”

“I can dig it,” the Beatle-head said with only a whisper of smoke sneaking out before he continued singing loudly along with the Stones.

Trey took the joint from me. “Take a deep drag. Try not to let any smoke escape,” he said, demonstrating.

I tried. Inhaling deeply and holding it until my lungs felt like they were about to blow. I flew into a coughing spasm. Somebody passed me a plastic cup with some pink wine in it. It was too bitter for my taste. But I took several sips, then a gulp, followed by another drag of the joint. Then I waited. Nothing happened. I wasn’t high, I laughed. Marijuana wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, I giggled. Then I drank some more wine. It tasted a little sweeter the second time around.

“You’re telling me you smoked that shit and you’re not high?” Trey asked.

“That’s right,” I said, snickering. “I don’t feel shit.”

Trey shook his head, right before leaving with this hippie chick he’d been rapping to.

The next time I smoked some grass with him was a couple weeks later. That time, we both got high. After that, we got loaded every weekend.

“When did you stop blowing weed?” I asked, passing the joint to Monica. She took a quick hit and immediately passed it back. It had been a couple of years since Trey and I had had time to sit down and rap. After he got back from the Nam he only visited PSU once while I was still there. By the time he had re-enrolled to make up those two lost years of college, I had stepped out into the work world. “And why?”

“I quit while I was in the War,” he said, taking a small sip of wine. “I was in a caravan that was headed for Phu Bai when we came under attack. Half the men in the 101st Airborne were either killed or maimed. I was spared. Not a even scratch but I took a direct hit here,” he said, his index finger touching his temple. “I decided then and there that if I wanted to get out of that toxic place alive and well and in one piece, I had to be sober and alert at all times. It was a good time to learn an important lesson: If you go through life fucked up, you’re going to fuck up your life. Or worse.”

“That’s heavy, Brother Trey. Real heavy,” I said, taking another hit and passing it on to Allison.

05/20/2010

It was
my third trip to Canada. The first time was an hour’s excursion into
Windsor while I was visiting an old girlfriend who had just moved to
Detroit back in 1969. I drove over through the tunnel so I could say I’d been out of
the United States. I stopped at a topless bar, downed a Molson and took
the bridge back to Detroit. It hadn’t been much of a trip in miles. But
it was a major expedition in my mind. From that day forward, I thought
of myself as an international traveler.

My second trip was to
Montreal in 1971. While on vacation, Allison and I drove up to visit my main man
and former college roommate, Ellis Alan Tate III, a.k.a. Trey. Trey was
an expatriate actor. He was playing Hamlet in Theatre Royal Shakespeare
de Montreal’s La Petite Salle. When we passed the theater, I jumped out
of the car looking for Trey’s name on the Marquee. I had imagined how
it would appear all along the way:

Ellis Alan Tate III
as Hamlet.

Not so. The marquee read, Now
Showing Much Ado About Nothing. A poster next to
the box office window said: Presenting Hamlet on the
Studio Stage.

She
was right, of course. But Trey was an awfully talented actor. As I
believed, I was an equally talented writer. We were part of a front of
first Blacks forging into the American mainstream, not as tokens, but as
agents for change. We were cutting edge. The next generation after what
I called the Gordon Parks phenomenon, where there was one Black star
here and one Black star there and that was that. We would have numbers
and we would have each other. I had imagined Trey and me making a big
splash right out of Pullman State. It hadn’t happened. Yet.

When
we got to Trey’s crib I rang the bell.

“Bonjour,” a
tinny voice rang through the intercom system. “Trey?”

“Trotsky?”

“In
Spectacolor.”

His trademark laugh was mechanically
distorted as it boomed through the intercom. He rang us in. We brought
up our luggage. Unpacked. Met his new lady, Monica, who was this cute,
cherubic, freckled redhead. We had an early evening snack. Then we were
off to the theater to see Trey perform. We were forced to make our way
through pickets who were marching in front of the theater and who spat
out hostile catcalls at us in obscene French.

“The
protesters are French nationalists. They’re demanding that the
Shakespearean Theater stage the works of some of Quebec’s indigenous
young playwrights,” Trey shrugged.

“En Francais?” Allison asked.

“Oui.
Oui. In French,” Trey replied.

I
shook my head. Monica Hurley, who was born and raised in Toronto,
flipped the finger at the protesters then scurried through the backstage
door. She was not just tagging along. Although she had seen the
production a dozen or so times, she was still enthusiastic about seeing
it again. I thought Trey was much better than the rest of the actors on
stage and told him so. He smiled and thanked me. I told him he’d star in
one of my movies someday. He smiled again.

After the
play, we went backstage and met the cast. Then we returned to Trey’s
apartment where we caught up. Trey and Monica were thinking about
jumping the broom. Monica was a dramaturge who had just finished writing
a play, Le Homme Noir Et La Femme Blanc. There was strong
interest. She said the play’s central characters, a Black man and white
woman, obviously star stuck lovers, symbolized the tragic relationship
between French and English Canadians. It was her second play. Her first,
When White Men Fail, had been repeatedly rejected. Then Trey
told us he wanted the title role in The Emperor Jones at
Montreal’s Centaur Theatre next. He hoped to ride the role all the way
to a Broadway revival.

I
pulled out my bag and rolled a joint. Allison took the first hit then
passed it on to Trey. He waved it off.

“I
don’t get high anymore,” he said.

I did a double take.
Trey was the one who introduced me to marijuana back in our freshman
year. Back then, everybody thought Trey was a compulsive liar. His tales
were too tall, tawdry and wild. Although you might like to try
some of the things Trey talked about, we knew nobody got the chance to
do all the things he said he did. He told tales about pot parties. He
spoke of ménage a trois. He talked about orgies.

All my
life I had heard that if you smoked marijuana, you became a drug
addict. Instantly hooked. “That’s bullshit,” Trey responded, when I
mindlessly repeated my parents’ warning. “It’s just a high.”

Since
I knew he was pulling my leg, I played along. “What’s it like?”

“What’s
what like?”

“The high. Do you have a hangover
afterwards?”

“No, when it’s over, it’s over. You might
be a little groggy--like right after you awaken from a deep sleep.
That’s it.”

At first I fought my curiosity but I
eventually gave in. I asked some of my other friends if they had tried
it. No, they said. They didn’t want to become junkies, didn’t want to go
to jail. Trey, they pointed out, was a bullshit artist at the top of
his craft. I shared their impression of Trey with him.